The road to clarity about South Dakota’s EB-5 scandal will not run directly through former Gov. Mike Rounds.

That is not saying the same thing as the Republican front-runner for the open U.S. Senate seat in South Dakota is or is not culpable. Just don’t expect a direct answer to questions about the scandal.

KSOO-AM’s Dan Peters and I spent the better part of an hour interviewing Rounds on the phone Friday afternoon during “Viewpoint University,” the daily call-in and interview program. Try as we might, we did not get Rounds off his EB-5 talking points that we’ve heard over the past year.

Things like:

  • Joop Bollen, director of the BOR’s South Dakota International Business Institute at Northern State University, was not his employee and was in the BOR’s and NSU’s chain of command.
  • The state is sued hundreds of times a year so Rounds says he probably didn’t see an admission of service in the Darley lawsuit/arbitration.
  • His former Secretary of Tourism and Economic Development, Richard Benda, was a troubled person, as we have found out.

In particularly, I was struck by two answers from Rounds. First, I asked him if didn’t seem odd that an office of state government — SDIBI, which was set up to get foreign investment for state economic projects — was unbeknown to anyone — spun off into a private concern run by SDIBI’s administrator and Regent employee, Joop Bollen, with no public notice or bidding.

Rounds said that that when SDIBI essentially became SDRC, Inc., it was good for South Dakota as the state was one of the few states that had actually ran its own EB-5 investment program. So, for competitive reasons, it was a good idea to privatize it.

While the logic of the change might be good, it still seems to be that it was self-dealing. Rounds didn’t say that he saw it that way.

The second question I asked concerned Bollen. The former governor had said the that EB-5 program depended upon “good people” to run it. I followed up and asked, “Were Richard Benda (former secretary of Tourism and Economic Development and Joop Bollen good people?”

Rounds would not say anything bad about Bollen. In fact, I don’t think he even brought up Joop’s name in his answer. What I did get was a long answer about Richard Benda’s now well-known travails and the tragedy of his alleged suicide.

But nothing about Bollen, a non-attorney who acted as an attorney for the state of South Dakota in a California lawsuit, who didn’t tell his bosses about the lawsuit, then spun off his own agency to his own corporation without public notice or bidding.

Our conversation with Rounds was professional and polite. Dan and I didn’t get mad and neither did Rounds. We appreciated the fact he’d talk to us about EB-5 as well as campaign issues. I try not to yell at people when I’m on the radio if I can help it. Bad form and all. All that gets you is a hang-up.

But with Bollen apparently in the Philippines and Rounds well practiced in his EB-5 responses, don’t expect much additional clarity from them anytime soon.

As journalists like the Aberdeen American News’ Bob Mercer, the Argus Leader’s David Montgomery, the Rapid City Journal’s Seth Tupper, the AP's Carson Walker and blogger Cory Allen Heidelberger (and a few others) have shown, it is most likely documents — not people — that will get to the bottom of what did and did not happen with the EB-5 program in South Dakota.

So, far there is no equivalent to Watergate’s “Deep Throat,” at least as far as I can tell. There is no all-knowing source that can lay out the mess and point people to the right sources. At least yet.

But some South Dakota journalists and bloggers are, as was said in Watergate, "follow(ing) the money."

The devil will be in the details — in the contracts, lawyer billings and other documents that continue to come out in dribs and drabs. It will be buried in the thousands of pages of documents from various state entities.

That is, if some of those documents even exist anymore. Democrat Minnehaha County Commissioner Jeff Barth’s lawsuit may or may not find that out. A hearing Oct. 27 might indicate if the federal judiciary will allow what is essentially an EB-5 fishing expedition to go forward.

Or if U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson actually is investigating anyone and if anyone actually will be indicted in this matter.

In the meantime, don’t expect Rounds or Bollen to say much that’s enlightening about the EB-5 mess — even when or if they do talk about it.

Below is the full interview in four segments.

Rounds talks about his appearance in Brookings with the opening of the Bel Brands facility. 

In this segment, Rounds explains his working relationship with Joop Bollen and his role in administering the EB-5 program at the state level. 

Rounds says there should be an evaluation of how government programs perform.

Finally, healthcare and energy are discussed as the campaign enters the final four weeks. 

 

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